How Lockdown Made Me Resilient (Spoiler Alert — it’s not how you might think)

I recently attended an online conference workshop called ‘Resilience through a Transformational Lens’ (AGCAS Employability Conference 2021). The workshop was targeted at higher education academics and careers professionals, aiming to equip them to empower students. But instead, I found myself taking much more from it on a personal level, and using it as a framework through which to reflect on and benchmark my own progress in this area. After all, thanks to the pandemic, the last 18 months have been nothing if not challenging on a global scale, and a year and a half on from the initial onset of lockdown, it seems wise to pause, take stock and ask myself the following questions: how far have I come, what have I learned, and have I changed for the better? After all, if I’m going to teach students how to be resilient, first I need to ensure that I’m practicing it myself.

I don’t know about you but pre-pandemic, the word ‘resilience’ was akin to swearing in my vocab; I’d literally bristle every time I heard it. Pre-Covid, employers would force their employees on ‘resilience training’, as if this state of being was something that could be taught during two hours in a classroom. Being brutally honest, I always felt that this was employers attempting to delegate responsibility and ownership for mental health and wellbeing onto individual employees, a way of saying ‘change is inevitable, so learn to deal with it’, without addressing the deeper issues of how and why change affects people. It was an unsatisfactory plaster over a gaping wound. And then came the pandemic, which was more change than anyone could swallow in one sitting, and one-off ‘resilience training’ cut it even less than previously as that wound started to fester. Employees needed more support and looked to their employers to provide it. Some did and some didn’t, but some individuals developed resilience via other means. Let me share my story…

In the aforementioned workshop, I learnt that ‘resilience’ is defined as ‘endurance’, ‘adaptive’ and ‘dynamic’, and that a combination of several traits contribute towards the umbrella that is ‘resilience’. These are:

· realistic optimism

· moral compass

· religious / spiritual beliefs

· cognitive and emotional flexibility

· social connectedness

Over the course of the rest of this article, I will address each of these in turn through the lens of my life.

Realistic Optimism

Pre-pandemic, I was not at all optimistic, realistically or otherwise. 2018 and 2019 were tough years for me. In 2018, I made the difficult decision to leave a church I’d been part of for several years, resulting in the loss of almost all of my close friends. I found myself having to start over socially, aged 36. At the same time, I went through a restructure at work, resulting in my being promoted. But the restructure rattled me, causing me to develop a crippling case of imposter syndrome. Six months later, I was moved to a large, open-plan office, in which the constant noise and interruptions stunted my creative and strategic thinking, stopping me from contributing fully to my new role and resulting in my manager and colleagues losing confidence in me. Back then, working from home wasn’t an option.

In early 2019, I stopped sleeping and snapped publicly, having a meltdown at work and needing to take a few days’ leave for anxiety. For the next three months, I could have gladly phoned in sick every single day, but forced myself to go into the office, not wanting to lose any further face or faith than I already had. Work stepped in, providing me with six free counselling sessions, which were like an oasis in the desert. But once they were over and too expensive to fund myself, I felt that I was on my own again, holding the pieces together with nothing more than my fingertips. It was a very challenging time, strewn with anxiety icebergs, threatening to sink my ship again just when I thought I was back on an even keel.

And then, a year later and virtually overnight, came lockdown, a much-needed personal respite. Lockdown was beyond my wildest, work-related dreams — a mandate to work from the safety of home full-time for 18 months. Setting aside the fact that people were dying in droves due to the pandemic, I was euphoric. For the first time in my working life, I was able to sit in the quiet solace of my house, day after day, uninterrupted, and work like I’d never worked before. My productivity rocketed, along with my confidence, my sickness levels dropped, and soon I was thinking both strategically and creatively on a daily basis, contributing constructively in meetings and leading my team in ways I’d never dared dream I was capable of. In short, lockdown baptised me and I felt reborn and whole again.

18 months on and I’ve used my new-found confidence to change jobs (hasn’t everyone in 2021?), finally migrating to the team that I’d aspired to work in for years. I’ve made a couple of new friends, rekindled the bond with an old friend, and repaired the relationship with my sister. Nowadays, I would describe myself as ‘realistically optimistic’ about work, life and the future, because I’ve discovered that there’s hope on the other side of pain. Nothing stays the same forever and sometimes, the most unexpected events can be of great benefit.

Moral Compass and Religious / Spiritual Beliefs

I’ve grouped these two factors into one because, as a believer in God, my moral compass is broadly based on the foundation of my religious / spiritual beliefs. I think that it’s the conviction of one’s beliefs and dedication to see those beliefs through which enables these factors to contribute towards an overarching resilience. I believe that strength comes, in part, from being in union and communion with your deity and at peace with yourself. After all, a house divided against itself will fall (Mark 3:25), as I did during my meltdown, when I couldn’t reconcile my imposter syndrome with the demands of my promotion and open-plan working space.

I believe that a large factor of being at peace with yourself comes from having a clear conscience and knowing that you’ve done all you can to honour the convictions of your mind, heart and spirit with your words and actions. Colossians 3:23 directs us to ‘work as if unto the Lord’, and since being given the opportunity to work full-time from home, I’ve been able to put this into practice, thus satisfying a deep-seated, personal conviction. I hate ungratefulness and as someone who believes that their job is a gift from God, it is vital to me that I honour him with my work. Lockdown has enabled me to succeed in this.

Cognitive and Emotional Flexibility

I define ‘cognitive flexibility’ as the ability to ‘think outside the box’. Naturally a ‘black and white’, ‘all or nothing’ thinker, especially when tired / anxious / stressed / all of the above, this is an area I’ve had to work on consciously, diligently and deliberately. On an almost daily basis, I have to remind myself that there might just be a third option, and maybe even a fourth or fifth. Having the space and silence by working from home during lockdown has allowed me to think creatively and thus flexibly. Turns out that there is usually more than one way to skin a cat. Who knew?

Brad Stulberg, fellow Medium writer, defines ‘Emotional flexibility (as) the capacity to produce context-dependent responses to life events, and to respond flexibly to changing emotional circumstances. In a nutshell, emotional flexibility is about holding everything at once — happiness, joy, and enthusiasm at the same time as anger, sadness, and frustration — and being able to feel differently at various points throughout the same day and perhaps even the same hour.’ It could be described as a sort of responsive, positive ambivalence, acceptance and openness to all facets of life, change and the feelings that inevitably accompany those.

I’ve had (and am still having) to exercise this with the ghosts of my ex-friends, which still haunt me over three years on. I try to examine things from their points of view to understand their motives and reasons for discarding me. Hopefully, this will prove a cathartic process, leading me past the pain and ultimately to forgiveness. I openly admit that I’m not there yet, but am much closer than I was. Lockdown has given me the space and time to reflect, work through my hurts, and rebuild much of my lost social confidence, learning to reach out to new people and to trust once again. At the same time, to combat my imposter syndrome, I’m working on reframing my thought-life, learning to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. Last month, I had the most positive appraisal of my career to date. Although, by the following Monday, I was in floods of tears in my ‘home office’, convinced that I wasn’t up to the demands of my new job. I was in danger of discarding all the positive feedback my manager had given me in favour of the negatives that I was poisoning myself with. This has got to stop — my resilience depends on it!

Social Connectedness

This resilience contributor is arguably the one that’s proven the weakest link for many worldwide during the pandemic, due to a lack of in-person, social contact, the void of which technology can only bridge to a limited extent. However, I was feeling socially disconnected long before Covid bit, after the mass exodus of my best friends and the introduction of my imposter syndrome, combined with open-plan-office-overwhelm, making me a professional pariah. Not only did the mass experience of social disconnectedness in lockdown level the playing field somewhat, but it gave me legitimate reason to hide away and heal. The requisite excuses and guilt over missed work nights out and failure to join in with daily office chit-chat suspended, I relished putting a screen between myself and colleagues. They went from 3D people in real life to 2D squares on my computer, confined to tiny boxes and tinny speakers. The ability to be alone again was just a click away. No more worries over eye contact, what to wear for work or whether my hair needed a wash.

Commanded to confine myself to my own home for months on end allowed me the space, silence and lack of stimulus I needed to process everything that had happened to me over recent years. It gave me a sense of order and control. Outside of the context of work, I only saw who I wanted to see. I took walks in the countryside, ignoring well-meaning strangers with their cheery, intrusive greetings. And by and by, as my beaten-back confidence recovered and blossomed once more, and as lockdown started to recede, a change began in me whereby I started to actively seek out more social contact with a range of people.

For the first time in forever, when Hubby brought work friends of his home, I made an effort to get to know them. On a recent staycation, I attended a festival and went out of my way to meet some of the locals. Lately, I’ve been chatting to my neighbours, rather than ducking into my house and hoping that they didn’t spot me. I have a big birthday in a couple of months and rather than celebrating at an intimate restaurant with Hubby and my parents, I’m going to have a house party.

To Conclude…

So, have I mastered resilience? Not yet, but I’m moving in the right direction thanks to the silver lining of life in lockdown, which has left me recharged, reinvigorated and ready to face the world once again. Would I want lockdown forever? No, but as a transformative time-out, it came at just the right time for me.